The Cure

Chapter 30

Melissa burst out laughing in the corridor.

'My God, girl.' She looked Lola up and down, her eyes twinkling, that habitual mischievous glitter. 'Been a while since I've been a mess like that. Must've been a good one.' She hummed. 'Who wants tequila?'

'Don't,' Lola covered her lips with her hand, willing the wave of nausea away as the memory of salt licks and flaming shots tiptoed through her mind; she could almost smell it. Melissa, evidently proud of her well-guessed mischief, smiled as Lola struggled to control herself.

'Well, are you just going to leave me out here in the corridor, or are you going to invite me in?'

Lola looked doubtfully about the flat. Nate's bedroom door was open.

'He's not here.'

'I know.' Melissa all but knocked Lola out of the way with one light movement of her hip as she waltzed about the doorframe. 'Thanks very much.'

Melissa sauntered in, bringing with her a tangle of limbs, and undiminished noise, and a stream of words, and a waft of perfume, and she was busy swiping on her phone and clattering on small heels across the parquet and she rustled in her handbag, and she hummed, and she clattered in the kitchen, a cacophony of warm and fragrant presence.

Too warm. Too fragrant. Too present.

Lola half-sprinted to the bathroom, her head spinning, to throw up again.

'Warmest welcome I've had in years,' Melissa said with a low giggle, as Lola crawled out of the bathroom, knees scraping along the floorboards; she made it as far as the bar until she collapsed, starfish and useless, face down in what she had decided would be her grave.

Lola hummed a groan, incapable even of opening her lips to reprimand the uninvited creature of commotion.

But no, it hadn't been a ruckus, it was medically methodical, doctor quick busyness, for the handbag had given up its treasures in the shape of two painkillers – 'don't ask what they are, I get access to the good shit,' – and the phone had readily ordered the greasiest pizza in town, and the kitchen clattering had magicked up an iced Coca-Cola, which fizzed now beside Lola's prostrate head, beside Melissa's neatly pedicured feet.

'You're an angel,' Lola told the dusty parquet.

'Get your sorry ass up.' They struggled as an unlikely pair to the sofa, where Lola swallowed the painkillers and the Cola with great difficulty, and then with great relish, the sweet fizz prickling over the tongue, erasing the taste of vomit, soothing the dryness; the headache, with the work of ten minutes, ebbing almost completely away; she took a large bite of pepperoni pizza, the oil slipping down her chin, humming with appreciation.

'Don't eat too fast,' Melissa warned as she kicked off her heels and pushed her skinny dark legs beneath the blanket she had dragged unceremoniously from Nate's bedroom and to Lola's sickbed; they shared the pizza in companionable silence, Lola slowly revitalising, Melissa, as ever, delighted to eat.

Eventually, Lola kicked the elephant in the room to one side.

'What are you doing here?'

'Don't you know?'

Lola hesitated, wiping her chin free of pizza flour, putting the half-finished slice into the pizza box.

'Nate told you I was a mess?'

'What? No.' She snorted suddenly. 'Glad I didn't miss that, though.' Lola smiled back, embarrassed, quietly hoping, despite herself, that he wouldn't find out how bad she had been; that she had thrown up in front of a stranger, who had had to scoop her feeble form from the floor. 'No. Actually, he doesn't know I'm here.'